Social networks have emerged as an increasingly popular platform for today's internet users. Contemporary social networking sites allow users to share various forms of user-generated content, including notes, photos, videos, event-related information and discussions between individual or groups of users. Moreover, social networks contain extensive amounts of personal information and relationships between individual users, in many cases recording changes over time that can extend back for years, if not all the way through to the initial creation of a user account. As such, modern social networks store a huge amount of user-generated data.
As a general rule, data security and integrity is provided by the social network itself, which operates as a cloud-like service. Major social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, FourSquare and others typically allow users to store data in the form of a chronicle of events (e.g., as a timeline), or in the form of various kinds of data collections (e.g., as a gallery). Thus, user data is often structured in an organized manner specific to each social network. This organized formatting allows users to easily traverse the data, for example by scrolling through a timeline or browsing collections. However, social network providers typically few if any authorized options for users looking to copy or duplicate data associated with their account(s).
Social networks often implement these restrictive policies by imposing limits on a user's ability to export their data directly through the social network interface. Similarly, social networks commonly limit external applications from accessing user data (e.g., by restricting the number of requests that may be received by an external application within a given timeframe). Popular social networks have a vested interest in restricting the transfer of user data, as a liberal transfer policy may potentially allow users to easily leave a social network and reintegrate the data into a new account on a competitor's social network.
Notwithstanding the social network providers' interest in restricting the transfer of user data, there are various legitimate reasons why a user may have a need to backup data stored on or otherwise associated with their social network account. For example, social networks may block user accounts, temporarily or permanently, for various reasons (e.g., for posting content in violation of the social network's policies). There is also the ever present threat that a user's account will be compromised by hackers, resulting in user data being lost, stolen or damaged. Software packages exist which allow a user to backup data from a social network account. However, current solutions are inadequate, as they fail to provide efficient and secure methods of backing up data.
Given these concerns and the lack of suitable alternatives, there exists a clear need in the art for efficient methods of backing up user data from social network accounts.